Censorship Of Publications Research Articles

Debates on family planning and the contraceptive pill in the Irish magazine Woman’s Way, 1963–1973

ABSTRACT This article explores discussions of family planning and the contraceptive pill in the popular Irish women’s magazine Woman’s Way between 1963 and 1973. Contraception was criminalised in Ireland in 1935 and literature relating to birth control was banned under the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act. The contraceptive pill was marketed as a cycle regulator from 1963 until legalization in 1979. This article outlines how women accessed the contraceptive pill, the geographical and class inequalities around this access and how Woman’s Way was an important vehicle for debates around the pill. The article assesses what discussions of the contraceptive pill can tell us about marriage dynamics, the role of sympathetic doctors, the power of the Catholic Church. Ultimately, it illustrates how the magazine was an important source of information on family planning for Irish women and how it also enabled women to air their views on the issue.

The Public Dance Halls Act, 1935: a re-examination

AbstractHistorical scholarship has interpreted the Public Dance Halls Act, 1935 in a relatively uniform manner. Most works on the subject have emphasised the expanding influence of Catholic church authorities over dancing following the enactment of the legislation, as well as the increasing restrictions placed on the freedom of dancers. The act has been viewed as one element in a sequence of pieces of legislation passed by successive Free State governments that aimed to limit and control citizens, including the Censorship of Films Act, 1923, and the Censorship of Publications Act, 1929. Using previously unexamined Department of Justice records, this article questions the dominant interpretation of the Public Dance Halls Act. It analyses whether dances moved predominantly into parochial halls, as has been the common understanding, and also considers whether the supposedly harsh restrictions imposed on dancers were actually enforced or observed. The article also proposes that two largely unexamined facets of the legislation and its subsequent implementation be given more consideration. Safety concerns played a sizeable part in shaping dancing regulations, as did the interests and worries of local communities. The article concludes by suggesting that lacunae in the historiography of dance halls in the 1930s are emblematic of wider gaps in Irish social and cultural history and recommends avenues for future research.

The Ban Formula

In a colonial context, and against the backdrop of an anti-colonial movement, it is all too easy to see censorship of publications operating along racial lines and to assume that only publications by Indian authors were subject to censorship. However, non-Indian authors—former colonial officials and soldiers, journalists and missionaries—writing in English on matters concerning India commanded audiences in their home countries in addition to being read by an influential section of the Indian population. Precisely because they escaped colonial stereotyping about ‘seditious natives’, non-Indian authors’ words carried a greater illusion of neutrality and sometimes more weight. Their criticism of the colonial state or excessive approbation of nationalist leaders could less easily be dismissed as biased than that by Indians. By reconstructing the question of, and the controversy over, the possible banning of seven such books by the colonial state in the 1920s–30s, this article will question commonly held assumptions about the conduct of the censorship of publications in late colonial India.

The Banning and Unbanning of Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices

This essay examines the circumstances of the prohibition of Kate O'Brien's novel The Land of Spices in 1941. It focuses on demonstrating how banning the novel as indecent was a way for the Irish censors to remove a work from circulation that they found objectionable for its critique of the standards of Irish Catholicism and the direction of the Irish state. The essay shows how the official evaluations of the novel revealed not only certain sensitivities in the new state, but also the ambiguity of the concept of indecency, as it was embedded in the Censorship of Publications Act.

Vigilantes da moral e dos bons costumes: condições sociais e culturais para a estruturação política da censura durante a ditadura militar

RESUMO Considerando a censura como parte de uma cultura da vigilância à liberdade de expressão, o artigo pretende demonstrar que, além de um eficaz instrumento de violação, quando se trata de defender a moral e os bons costumes, a censura consiste em um instrumento político de legitimação perante setores da sociedade civil, um endosso do Estado àquilo que é considerado pertinente aos valores da família cristã. A discussão será feita a partir da análise das condições sociais e culturais em que se deu o processo de estruturação política e institucionalização da censura de publicações consideradas ofensivas à moral e aos bons costumes durante a ditadura militar. O objetivo do artigo é contribuir com os estudos sobre as estratégias de poder e os comportamentos sociais diante do autoritarismo, a fim de compreender as bases sociais de sustentação do poder autoritário.

Le crayon bleu de la censure : oeuvres d’auteurs français interdites au Portugal entre 1933 et 1974

. The Censor’s Blue Pen: Works by French Authors Banned in Portugal between 1933 and 1974. The dictatorial regime imposed by the Estado Novo regime in force in Portugal between 1933 and 1974 imposed a severe censorship of publications in general and more specifically to books published in Portugal and abroad. Because of the influence that French culture had, many authors, ancient and contemporary, from Flaubert to Sartre going through Sagan, had their works banned. The reasons for the ban were several: the persecution of the author, the work and sometimes to the editor, as exemplified by Francisco Lyon de Castro and his Europa-América publishing company.

Censorship: The Cornerstone of Catholic Ireland

This article will explore the religio-political dynamic that drove the deepening of censorship in the Irish Free State, with a particular focus upon the literary-journalistic censorship heralded in by the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act. Censorship, it will be argued, was introduced by an insecure state at the insistence of the Irish Catholic Church,2 hereafter referred to as “the church,” an institution that the Free State depended on for its very survival. The church, for its part, viewed the Free State and its people as a uniquely positioned vehicle to fulfill God's mission, a mission that the church believed was under attack from foreign influences. Additionally, Irish Catholicism will be shown to have been deeply conservative and authoritarian with an overstated pessimism regarding the people of Ireland's ability to withstand foreign vice without the application of rigid clerical discipline—a feature born of Irish Catholicism's particular theological underpinning, which led to the Irish people being viewed as “children” in need of “parental” protection and guidance by both church and Nationalist ideologues.3

Setting the Agenda for the Press: The 1929 Case Against the Waterford Standard

On October 29, 1929, the Dublin weekly Catholic newspaper the Standard proudly proclaimed that the first prosecution under the Censorship of Publications Act, 1929 had been successful in a cases tried in Waterford City. The case brought against David C. Boyd, the editor of a provincial newspaper, the Waterford Standard, would influence the reporting of sexual crimes in the Irish Free State, and later, the Republic of Ireland, for decades to come. Despite its importance, the case has been largely overlooked in histories of censorship and Irish journalism, and even during the course of Boyd's prosecution the case received only limited coverage. The Irish press that had demonstrated a general compliance with censorship during the period of consultation prior to the bill and through its passage in the Dail and Seanad. Much of the scholarly interest in this area has focused on the more visible impact of censorship on sections of the literary community, who—while often socially marginalized and small in number— highlighted their concerns during the debate of the censorship measure, and continued to push the boundaries after its passage.

Introduction: Pascendi dominici gregis The Vatican Condemnation of Modernism

Introduction: Pascendi dominici gregis The Vatican Condemnation of Modernism C.J.T. Talar Undoubtedly, were anyone to attempt the task of collecting together all the errors that have been broached against the faith and to concentrate into one the sap and substance of them all, he could not succeed in doing so better than the Modernists have done. Pascendi dominici gregis (#39) T he third part of the antimodernist encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis— reputed to have been written by Pope Pius X himself—made it clear that Modernism was perceived to be of such gravity and its partisans of such tenacity that identification of their multiple errors was not enough. The final portion set in place a series of control measures that would affect the state of Catholic scholarship for decades to come. Catholic theologians, exegetes, historians and philosophers , indeed Catholic intellectuals more largely (novels could find their way on to the Index of Forbidden Books just as well as more scholarly writings), were put on notice that their work would be subject to increased surveillance. And local ordinaries were given to understand that they were accountable for strict censorship of publications within their dioceses and for the institution and maintenance of councils of vigilance to enlarge the scope of scrutiny.1 The amount of attention given to surveil1 1. The interdiction of Modernist writings “or whatever savors of Modernism or promotes it” from seminarians or university students is specified in Pascendi (#50). Beyond the prevention and sale of such material there is the necessity to prevent it from coming into print in the first place—hence sections devoted expressly to censorship (#51 and 52). Diocesan Vigilance Committees, “charged with the task of noting the existence of errors and the devices by which new ones are introduced and propagated, and to inform the Bishop of the whole, so that he may take counsel with them as to the best means for suppressing the evil at the outset and preventing it spreading for the ruin of souls or, worse still, gaining strength and growth,” were the object of section #55. The foundational role of scholastic philosophy as normative basis for sound formation in theology and canon law, the “diligence and severity” required “in examining and selecting candidates for Holy Orders,” the regulation of editorship or collaboration with periodicals on the part of priests or their participation in congresses (this last to be permitted only “on very rare occasions”) for the subjects of several sections of this portion of the encyclical (#45, 46, 49, 53 and 54). Lastly, accountability lance and sanction, and the rigor with which both could be applied, serve as indicators of the anxiety induced by the Modernist crisis among official guardians of the faith. Catholic polemicists could decry Protestant and Kantian infiltrations into the ranks of the clergy itself,2 precipitating a climate of dogmatic anarchy among some of its members.3 Such characterizations of the crisis were not a case of polemical excess. As one who lived through the Modernist crisis and knew some of its principal figures well, Maude Petre was in a position to comment with some authority. Some decades later she wrote, We must remember, in fairness to those who were not always fair, that the impact of historical criticism on the traditional teaching of the Church was terrifying; that it seemed a case of saving the very essence of the Christian faith from destruction. Not, perhaps, since the startling revelation of Copernicanism, had the shock been greater.4 The language adopted in Pascendi comes across as harsh and uncompromising— to the point that at the time some of its defenders felt it necessary to justify not only its content but its tone. The encyclical is so out of an apparent conviction that no compromise was possible. The enemy was no longer at the gates; it had penetrated the 2 U.S. Catholic Historian for all this was specified in the form of triennial returns (#56). (The translation of Pascendi used throughout is that which appears in Vincent A. Yzermans, ed., All Things in Christ (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1954). 2. In Les infiltrations protestantes et le clergé français (Paris: Victor Retaux, 1901...

Fabulism and Irish Censorship

The aim of the article is to analyse the effects of the introduction of Censorship legislation on Irish culture. The analysis focuses on the reasons behind the introduction of the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 and previous cases of literary ostracism. Then, it deals with anti-censorship journalism published in The Bell and the most controversial bannings, which increased the general awareness of the inadequacies of the Act and caused it to be lifted. Finally, the article examines the Act's impact on Irish letters, especially the rise of fabulist fiction and the techniques used by writers such as Eimar O'Duffy, Flann O'Brien, and Mervyn Wall to circumvent and ridicule the censorship laws. The emergence of satirical fantasy writing can be seen as a reaction to oppressive legislation. As publishing realistic novels became nearly impossible, Irish writers expanded their range of expression to include non-mimetic fiction.

'The best banned in the land': Censorship and Irish Writing since 1950

The cloud of state censorship that had cast a shadow over the Irish literary landscape since 1930 eventually began to lift in the late 1960s. The appeals mechanism introduced in 1946 had undone some of the worst excesses of the early years of censorship (to largely symbolic effect, as most of the titles were out of print), but the first signs of liberalization did not appear until the late 1950s, when control of the Censorship Board was wrested from the Catholic Action cabal that had run it since the beginning. The improvement was limited and Irish writers continued to regard the censorship of their work as an occupational hazard; indeed, as the list of banned writers contained the majority of the greatest contemporary writers in the English language, inclusion on the register was seen by some as an inverted badge of honour. The controversies generated by the banning of works by John McGahern and Edna O'Brien in the 1960s helped fuel the movement for reform, and in 1967 the censorship legislation was overhauled. This resulted in the gradual unbanning of the Irish books on the list over the next twelve years, and also marked the end of the censorship of Irish writers, with the sole exception of Lee Dunne, who carried the flag into the 1970s. (1) The passage of the Censorship of Publications Act, 1929 had been the result of a sustained campaign by Catholic Action groups after independence, part of a general process of 'Catholicization' that became the primary element in the forging of a separate Irish identity. (2) The demands for censorship focused on the need to control the availability of imported birth control literature, together with popular British periodicals and newspapers with salacious content. The problem of 'sex novels' and 'drainpipe fiction' was alluded to, but not foregrounded in the push for a state censorship system that would replace the inherited British controls, based on the courts, which were deemed inadequate. (3) Because of the hostility to modern literature (as part of a general hostility to modernism) that permeated the ideology and discourse of the groups and individuals at the forefront of the censorship movement, many in the literary community feared that books rather than periodicals, and serious literature rather than pornography, would become the focus of control; their fears were well-founded. Under the terms of the act, a censorship board of five, appointed every three years by the minister for justice, recommended to the minister the permanent prohibition of any book or periodical if it was deemed to be in its 'general tendency indecent or obscene', or if it advocated contraception or abortion. Indecent was defined as 'suggestive of, or inciting to sexual immorality or unnatural vice or likely in any other similar way to corrupt or deprave', while obscene was not defined. The composition of the successive boards, from the first in 1930 until 1957, remained consistent: a member of the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland (CTSI) and/or the Knights of St Columbanus as chairman, together with three other Catholics (usually CTSI and/or Knights of Columbanus members), and a token Protestant, represented by a Trinity College Dublin academic. As a four-to-one majority was sufficient to ban a book, the Trinity representative was, in the words of banned writer Francis Hackett, a 'decoy ... a hostage Protestant. His could be the Diary of a Superfluous Man'. (4) According to the secretary of the Board, this in-built majority was an unstated but understood arrangement with successive ministers for justice. (5) The requirement to take the general tendency and overall merit of a book into account was ignored from the outset as the censors waged war on modern literature, backed up by the customs authorities and organized groups who scoured books for objectionable passages, marked them, and sent them on to the board. Most of the leading writers of modern fiction from Britain, America, and continental Europe (English translations only)--Proust, Nabokov, Boll, Huxley, Zola, Mann, Greene, Malraux, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, H. …